Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Jamaat-ud-Dawah and Jaish-e-Mohammad are planning mass demonstrations on Feb. 5.

Pakistani organizations with links to banned militant groups are planning mass public demonstrations on Kashmir Day, raising questions about the effectiveness of government restrictions placed on them.

Kashmir Solidarity Day has been observed every Feb. 5 since 1991 after Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed proposed it a year earlier. The public holiday expresses Pakistan’s support for the right of Kashmiris to self-determination and usually includes mass rallies from various sectors of society.

It has often been a sore point in Pak-Indo relations, as the mass rallies tend to focus on action against Indian-administered Kashmir.

This year promises to be no different with the Hafiz Saeed-led Jamaat-ud-Dawah, widely seen as the charity wing of the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba, planning demonstrations nationwide.

India has long accused the LeT of staging attacks on Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people and has demanded Islamabad try Saeed for his alleged role in the tragedy. Islamabad claims New Delhi has been unable to provide sufficient evidence to prosecute Saeed in court.

Pakistan’s troubled association with the JuD is nothing new. Then-president Pervez Musharraf outlawed the LeT in 2002. The militant outfit promptly rebranded as the JuD—a common tactic for banned groups in Pakistan looking to circumvent state sanctions. In 2008, after the U.N. Security Council added Saeed and four senior LeT leaders to a sanctions list, Islamabad froze the JuD’s bank accounts, and placed Saeed under arrest. The detention was short-lived and the JuD claims it currently has no restrictions on its operations.

“Mr. Saeed and four other members [of LeT] have been proscribed, not our entire organization,” said JuD spokesman Yahya Mujahid. Pakistan’s High Commissioner in New Delhi Abdul Basit has also said that the existing sanctions are limited. “Their funds are frozen, there is an arms embargo and they can’t travel outside Pakistan,” he said.

Efforts to curtail their online presence have yielded mixed results. In December, six months after the U.S. formally sanctioned the group, social media site Twitter suspended the group’s “official” account, hoping to deprive it of a platform it often uses to promote an anti-India narrative, as well as to raise funds. Within hours, the group was back online with a tweaked handle—@JUD_Official01. Twitter took that down as well—to no avail. The group is already back on Twitter under the handle @JamatDawah.

The Pakistan government’s recent claims that any inciting groups would be dealt with severely also appear to have failed and there appears to be no bar on the JuD’s right to assembly. On Jan. 25, the “banned” group led a 12,000-strong demonstration in Lahore against the publication of a caricature of Islam’s Prophet in French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Organizers say they plan to take that demonstration nationwide in the coming weeks with more protests planned in Lahore, Karachi, Hyderabad, Rahim Yar Khan and Multan.

But the JuD isn’t the only extremist group planning to come out on Kashmir Day. Another major participant of this year’s demonstrations is Maulana Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The Kashmir-focused militant group is accused of an armed raid on the Indian parliament in 2001 and, like the LeT, has been banned in Pakistan since 2002. Unlike that group, Jaish—which rebranded as the Khuddam ul-Islam—keeps a low profile and is primarily active only in Kashmir.

In January 2014, Azhar addressed an anti-India rally in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but has drawn little public attention since. This year, however, a senior commander of the group says it will join hands with the JuD on Feb. 5.

“We are not going as Jaish,” says the commander, on condition of anonymity. “We are going to participate in a closed door event organized by Saeed on Karachi’s University Road,” he added. He said Azhar, believed to be in Kashmir, would not be attending.

Tuesday, 4 February 2014

KARACHI (AAP) – Kashmir Solidarity Day will be observed in the metropolis on Tuesday with a spirit to impress upon the world the need to resolve the issue of Kashmir in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the Kashmiri people and bring their decades-long suffering to an end.

Newspapers, radio stations and television channels through their print and aired features will highlight the dispute of Kashmir which has kept the territory and the people divided against their wishes since the former British rulers left the sub-continent, giving option to the people of Kashmir to decide their own destiny through a plebiscite. They will also highlight the inability of the United Nations to implement its own resolution of 1948 on the issue of Kashmir despite acknowledging the Kashmir as a disputed area.

The day has been declared a public holiday like the past years. It is observed officially since 1989 every year on Feb 5, as the then government decided to internationalise the issue to draw attention of greater part of the world towards its importance and the need to resolve the same.

Speakers at gatherings will remind the world about this lingering issue and emphasise the need for its early solution in light of UN resolution. They will also point to the plight of the people of Occupied Kashmir whose generations have suffered atrocities and brutality at the hands of occupation power because of their demand to be accorded their right of self determination.

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